August 1, 2008

"To me, it was pretty shocking. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. "People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."

One researcher, Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, looked at Milgram's original experiment in the hopes of updating it for the digital world. "Milgram's startling conclusion turns out to rest on scanty evidence," she says. "The idea of 'six degrees of separation' may, in fact, be plain wrong-the academic equivalent of an urban myth."

I don't know if this is the case in other disciplines, but the music world rarely needs even the six degrees of separation; more often than not, three will do. I'm rarely even surprised anymore by all the little connections out there.